Decisions in various contexts can have a profound impact on results achieved. In the case of businesses, decisions made by employees across all levels and functional roles can significantly affect ultimate success or failure. More specifically, decisions, whether strategic or tactical, can impact, for example, revenue growth, exposure to lawsuits, level of risk for loss or injury to persons or property, customer defections/acquisitions and product and service desirability.
In the case of personal matters, decisions made by individuals on a daily basis typically have a strong impact on the quality of their lives, the quality of their relationships and their ultimate happiness. Decisions in this context can be decisions made with respect to an individual's social interactions, decisions relating to an individual's work life and/or decisions related to other activities or relationships maintained by the individual.
Due to the prevalence of computers and other consumer electronic devices, a very significant amount of communication between and among individuals occurs electronically. This may include emails between friends or emails between employees in a corporate environment. Similarly, employees may receive and/or send emails from or to many third parties in connection with their job responsibilities. Other forms of communication are also frequently used in sharing information in both corporate and personal environments. For example, documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, photos, videos, drawings and many other forms of data are used to communicate information from one or more persons to one or more other persons.
In the great majority of these communications, there exists at least some linguistic data. In other words, most of these communications, regardless of form, includes some data comprising written language. There has been a great deal of study to date with respect to how this written language may affect future events and/or decisions. The language contained in these communications may be analyzed at either a micro or macro level or anything in between. In other words, single communications, such as an email from one person to another may be studied and may be indicative of some mindset or some other characteristic that could possibly be a predictor of a future event, some risk that may be present or some other decision that should or could be made. At the other end of the spectrum, large groupings of communications can be aggregated and analyzed to generate the same kinds of predictions. For example, a set of corporate communications between employees to include the content of the email itself as well as attached documents and other materials, can be collectively analyzed over some time period to make various assessments about risks and provide decision making support.
While there exist a number of helpful tools and systems for analyzing such data, there also exist a number of drawbacks. In some cases, the analysis is less than ideal due to the way the analysis is conducted. For example, in some cases, linguistic data is processed to generate a dictionary of terms and equate some level of importance to each of these terms for use in the analysis. Often, terms are weighted with either too much or too little importance due to various factors, resulting in a skewed analysis which may not provide for ideal decision support. Similarly, current systems may be overbroad or too narrow in terms of the dataset used for the analysis. In other cases, even though the analysis may be acceptable, the application of the analysis to decision support and/or predictive functions is not ideal.